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<A NAME="BABJBFGG"></A><h1>About PBDOM</h1>
<A NAME="TI2138"></A><p>PBDOM is the PowerBuilder implementation of the Document Object
Model (DOM), a programming interface defining the means by which
XML documents can be accessed and manipulated. </p>
<A NAME="TI2139"></A><p>Although PBDOM is not an implementation of the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) DOM API, it is very similar. The PBDOM PowerBuilder API
can be used for reading, writing, and manipulating standard-format
XML from within PowerScript code. PBDOM portrays an XML document
as a collection of interconnected objects and provides intuitive
methods indicating the use and functionality of each object. </p>
<A NAME="TI2140"></A><p>PBDOM is also similar to JDOM, which is a Java-based document
object model for XML files.</p>
<A NAME="TI2141"></A><p>For information on the W3C DOM and JDOM objects and hierarchies,
refer to their respective specifications. The W3C DOM specification
is available<A HREF="http://www.w3.org/DOM/"></A>
.
The JDOM specification, or a link to it, is available<A HREF="http://www.jdom.org/docs/"></A>
.</p>
<A NAME="TI2142"></A><p>With PBDOM, your applications can parse existing XML documents
and extract the information contained as part of a business process
or in response to an external request. Applications can also produce
XML documents that conform to the type or schema required by other
applications, processes, or systems. Existing XML documents can
be read and modified by manipulating or transforming the PBDOM tree
of objects instead of having to edit XML strings directly.</p>
<A NAME="TI2143"></A><p>You can also build components that can produce or process
XML documents for use in multitier applications or as part of a
Web service.</p>
<A NAME="TI2144"></A><h4>Node trees</h4>
<A NAME="TI2145"></A><p>PBDOM interacts with XML documents according to a tree-view
model consisting of parent and child nodes. A document element represents
the top-level node of an XML document. Each child node
of the document element has one or many child nodes that represent
the branches of the tree. Nodes in the tree are accessible through
PBDOM class methods.</p>
<A NAME="TI2146"></A><h4>XML parser</h4>
<A NAME="TI2147"></A><p>The PBDOM XML parser is used to load and parse an XML document,
and also to generate XML documents based on user-specified DOM nodes.</p>
<A NAME="TI2148"></A><p>PBDOM provides all the methods you need to traverse the node
tree, access the nodes and attribute values (if any), insert and
delete nodes, and convert the node tree to an XML document so that
it can be used by other systems.</p>

